Whistling
by Mydela
Summary: He can run, but they will find him. They will find him in the end.
1. Chapter 1

Whistling.

Someone in the lodging house was whistling.

What did anyone have to whistle about?

An extra dime at the end of every workweek? Enough saved to maybe buy a prostitute or a ticket to the vaudeville?

It was hard enough to believe that three hours ago he had been whistling too. Happy with a jacknife he'd found in the gutter, sharpening it happily and whistling.

The rest was an accident. He tried to convince himself it was an accident. He surely hadn't meant to stab anyone.

Had he?

Well, maybe he was feeling a little more possesive than usual that night. It was a really good knife. And it was his.

Yes, and it was really good at sliding smoothly through skin and muscle and blood. And that act had been his, too. Irrevokably, unchangeably his.

Whoever was whistling now was sure to find the body. Was it Mush he had killed? Blink? Racetrack? He had looked down to see who it was, but now he had forgotten the face. He only remembered the blood. You couldn't tell individual people by their blood. It was all red.

Everyone would know it was him that did it, and they would all be looking for him. Maybe they would get Spot and them to help them look, and Spot and them would find him. They would find him in the end.

The whistling he heard signaled his death.

He ran.

He did not run in a straight line and he did not look where he was going.

It was pitch black, maybe two or three AM, and cloudy. Had he done it on purpose? _No_, he answered himself.

He kept running. _Well, maybe I did._

He found himself a long time later at Grand Central Station. He couldn't remember how he got there. It was still dark.

He huddled in the corner of a bench near the tracks. After awhile, he slid under the bench, instead.

They would find him. It didn't matter if he did it on purpose or not. They would find him.

It wouldn't be fast, either. The one he'd killed had died fast. He wouldn't be so lucky.

He felt in his pockets for the knife. It was gone. He'd left it at the lodging house.

They would probably use that knife on him.

He would deserve it.

It didn't matter whether he meant to do it or not. That sort of thing was irrelevent. What mattered was the act and not the motive.

Whistling.

He heard whistling.

A train, a little ways from the station.

It grew louder. It grew and grew and grew until it filled his ears, until it wasn't whistling anymore. It was screaming now.

The train was coming fast.

They would find him. They would find him and his death would not be fast.

The train screamed.

He walked over to the tracks and watched it come.

It screamed.

He walked onto the tracks and watched it come.

Whistling. He'd been whistling before he killed someone, probably his friend. He couldn't be sure.

Someone else had been whistling before finding the body.

The train was close now. Screaming.

Whistling. He heard whistling in that scream.

A/N: I have no idea where this came from. No clue. But I think I should be scared…


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: well, this was originally going to be a one-shot because I didn't actually know who killed who (so they were going to remain artfully anonymous. To disguise my uhh…lack of imagination…) But I thought of an answer…it's a little strange and I don't like what I did to two of my favorite characters sob, sob. I'm getting out the marshmallows for all the flames I think I'll get for it.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed! Wisecracker88, Unknown-Dreams, kaitins, Pancakes, and madmbutterfly713 (I can't whistle either), and volatile.virgin for the constructive criticism. I was experimenting with the style, so yes, it is kind of overdone, but just as a warning this chapter isn't all that less choppy.

Disclaimer: I am so broke. So don't sue me.

* * *

Jack was dead. 

Jack was dead and it was obvious who did it. His knife was lying right there.

He would have known everyone would come after him. He would have run.

And he did run. All the way to the train station. Made it all the way there and into the path of the next train to Boston.

So now he was dead too, just like Jack. He had to have known he was dead anyway, living, breathing, but dead. He just saved everyone else the trouble of making it legal.

Why did he do it?

He was just a little kid, really, maybe not even ten. He looked up to Jack like a little kid looked up to an older brother, like Les looked up to me. Jack was nice to him. Jack taught him stuff. Where to sell. How to sell.

The damn little shit, we all _liked_ him!

Was he crazy?

Was there really any other explaination?

The knife was just…a knife. A nice knife, but pretty run-of-the-mill. Usually, when a newsie left, his stuff was up for grabs.

But we buried the knife in a deep, deep hole. No one wanted it. It was evil.

Evil was a concept that escaped most of the residents of the Duane Street Lodging House. It wasn't relevant to their lives. Their rule was: you did what you had to do to survive and that was it, bad, immoral, whatever.

But for him to stab Jack, that was different. That was an evil that they could understand.

Jack couldn't have been threatening anybody's survival. At least, not anyone he regarded as an honorary little brother. And a friend.

Right?

I didn't think we'd ever know.

Maybe we didn't want to know.

They scraped him off the tracks and off the front of the train and put him in a grave marked "unknown." that's all that was written on the marker, the tiniest, cheapest charity marker possible.

They kept him around at the city morgue for a while to see if anyone would come in to identify him, and they ran a two-sentence sidebar in the _Sun_: "Young boy, nine or ten years old, found on the railroad tracks at Grand Central Station, dead of an apparent suicide. If anybody can positively identify this boy, please contact the city morgue…"

We all read the papers. We all read the article.

No one came forward for him.

We didn't decide it that way, we just didn't do it. Like an unspoken agreement. A pact in invisible blood.

And so he remained unknown. And always will remain unknown.

The irony was, no one seemed to know his actual name.

We all just called him Boots.


End file.
